


i think your love would be too much

by apocalypsepoet



Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: F/M, frank is mentioned only, i like matt i just dont love matt ok, kastle - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-10 00:44:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17415731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalypsepoet/pseuds/apocalypsepoet
Summary: Matt brings her roses.





	i think your love would be too much

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really excited for this! I've never posted kastle before, because I've never actually written for this fandom.  
> I hope you like it, hope I wasn't too harsh on Matt, cause I like the guy, I just don't Love him.

Matt buys her roses.

It's not that she doesn't like roses, or that she isn't grateful for his kindness. She appreciates the gesture; roses just aren’t her favorite. But Matt wouldn’t know that, obviously. He wouldn’t know much; only what she’s told him. Only what he’s asked. They’ve known each other only really on a surface level; a we-went-on-three-and-a-half-dates type of relationship. It’s like two strangers going out a second time after being set up on a blind date by their overbearing friends with good intentions.

No pun intended.

Karen doesn’t hate roses; she’d just prefer a tall pot of sunflowers, ones that are big and bright and survive through the changing season. Her grandmother always had the best sunflowers on the block. Would tell her that people were like sunflowers: similar but unique. She'd say “Ya can never seem to get rid of ‘em either!” Her grandmother was warm and wise and loved her and Kevin dearly. So, of course Karen loved sunflowers because they reminded her of her grandmother. They reminded her that life can be beautiful: Even in the worst of winters, the flowers always wound up blooming on her grandmother's lawn. She loves to watch them bloom; turning themselves to face the sun.

Roses, not so much. Especially ones coming from Matt. But of course, there’s no way he would actually _know_ that she isn’t fond of them, because he never asked, she never told him, and she has a pot of fake ones perched on her windowsill. And somehow he _does_ _know_ that there’s a small pot of plastic white roses that clearly don’t need sunlight on the windowsill. He made an assumption that she can’t fault him on. She wishes he could read minds as much as he can hear heartbeats. (Her mind would be screaming for someone else. Her heart sure is).

The ones he brings are lavender and peach and later she’ll regret looking up the meaning of the colors. She hopes he didn’t pick them specifically. (She knows he did).

So, no. She doesn’t hate all roses; only the real ones that inevitably wither away and die (or pretend to get crushed by a collapsed building for months while she keeps paying their rent in hopes they come back).

If she’s being honest, and she’s really, really trying to be more honest with herself lately, she will only accept roses from one person. But Matt wouldn’t know _that_ , either. In fact, she’s not entirely sure he even knows that Frank isn’t really dead (for what, the third time? Fourth?)

Unless, you know, _he is_ , considering he disappeared after leaving her in an elevator and hasn’t shown his stupid bloody knuckles and bruised face since. The back of her mind whispers that that night at the carousel in Central Park was The Punisher’s final stand; the end of Frank Castle. Karen Page’s final story. Because after everything she did, stirring the pot with Fisk, admitting she was the one who shot Wesley (seven times, mind you), inadvertently killing a priest and her colleagues––friends––at the Bulletin, she half-expected Frank to show up on her fire escape, yell at her for twenty minutes before chugging a peace-offering beer and then leaving.

She half-expected he would show up, unannounced, just to kill Fisk and that piece of shit fake Daredevil since just months prior he was yelling at her at a pier in the freezing wind about how he “cannot let that happen to you!”

So, of course her brain immediately goes to ‘Frank is _deaddeaddead_ and there was so much you wanted to tell him but now you’ll never get the chance’ and she has to constantly tell it to shut the hell up. The honest truth is that she just misses him. A lot. Karen wonders if that makes her fucked up. Missing a mass murderer. Chasing that smell of blood and bullets. Finding comfort and warmth as they swayed together in her apartment. God, she just misses his constant looming presence in her life. Especially when it’s late at night and she’s all alone because while she loves working with Matt and Foggy again, they aren’t always the easiest to talk to, and Trish is either too busy or too emotionally drained, she’s still sort of giving Ellison the silent treatment, and all her friends at the Bulletin are dead.

She’s losing her mind. She wishes he would show up on her couch with blood caked under his nails and halfway to a hipster beard. Drink beer and swap stories. Lean her forehead against his own. Breathe together, if only for a stolen moment.

Instead it’s Matt knocking on her door at nine o’clock on a Thursday night. It's sweet in a way only Matt can be. Karen doesn't want sweet anymore, and roses smell too much.

Matt bought her fucking lavender roses and the plastic ones have been sitting in the sill for seven months collecting dust because she needed Frank and he didn’t show up but she keeps them there still. They’ve started to yellow, as white tends to do, and Matt brings her goddamn peach and lavender roses she feels obligated to try and keep alive for more than a week.

“I noticed you only have fake ones,” he said. “Thought you’d like the smell of the real things.”

She doesn’t.

The perfume suffocates her in her tiny apartment but she doesn’t tell him that. It winds through the hallway and sinks into the cracks in the floorboards. It refuses to leave. It reminds her of when she let Frank up to her apartment even though he was supposed to be dead to her. He gave her roses and while they aren’t her favorite, she crushed him with a hug he definitely did not expect. But it was nice to be suffocated by the smell of him. Actually clean for once, she thinks. No blood. Drugstore shampoo. Spicy––cinnamon. Gunpowder. Metal. Just Frank things. She wishes she could remember what he looked like when she pulled away.

She gently takes them anyway, cuts the stems, drops them in a vase and places them on her coffee table––far away from her window. They’re the ones that need the sun but she refuses to move her only connection to Frank in the hopes that maybe one day, eventually, he’ll be casually strolling by and look up and see that his white flowers are yellow with age and disappointment and longing and desperation. _(Endless, echoing loneliness)._

She mutters a small ‘thank you’ before she’s basically shoving Matt out the door. She stares at both pots of roses for a long time before forcing herself to just go to sleep.

 

(She dreams of sunflowers and gunpowder and she thinks it smells perfect).

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on tumblr now at onebatchtwohands :)


End file.
